OF CREATION. 105 



in our own island, the coal-measures are more or less 

 covered up with beds, consisting of this coarse grit 

 overlaid by clay and limestone, the clay being often 

 remarkably bituminous, and the limestone generally 

 exhibiting the chemical peculiarity already alluded to, 

 containing a certain proportion of carbonate of mag- 

 nesia, mixed with the carbonate of lime. In the 

 east of Europe, however, and more especially in 

 Russia, this series is exhibited in its greatest complete- 

 ness. It is there found occupying a hollow or trough- 

 like depression in the carboniferous strata, and is said 

 to extend for a distance of nearly seven hundred miles 

 from north to south, arid for four hundred miles be- 

 tween the Ural chain and the river Volga, in the 

 ancient kingdom of Permia, now included within the 

 vast compass of the Russian empire. In this tract con- 

 glomerates and grit-stones, with magnesian and other 

 limestones, make up the series, and contain fossils iden- 

 tical with those common in Durham and the neigh- 

 bourhood of Bristol. Over the whole of Europe, 

 therefore, similar causes seem to have acted in produc- 

 ing this series of magnesian strata at the close of the 

 carboniferous period; and a dreary waste of sandy un- 

 productive beds seems to mark the disappearance of 

 land clothed with vegetation, and the gradual deep- 

 ening of the sea, which at first received rolled and 

 pounded fragments of rock, carried out to a distance 

 in the form of sand, until afterwards, the land dimi- 

 nishing and disappearing, even this small supply 

 ceased, and scarcely any deposit or any fragment of 

 organic existence was retained, in consequence of the 

 absence of material in which it could be buried and 

 preserved. 



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